Soon after the impeachment motion against President Dilma Rousseff was approved in the Brazilian Congress by what I chose to call Hybrid War hyenas, President-in-Waiting Michel Brutus Temer, one of the coup's articulators, dispatched a senator to Washington as special paperboy to deliver the news on the coup in progress. The senator in question was not on an official mission for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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Brutus Temer was alarmed by global media reaction, which is increasingly interpreting what he's doing -- allied with Brutus Two, notoriously corrupt head of the lower house Eduardo Cunha -- for what it is: a coup.

The senator's mission was allegedly to launch a PR offensive to counter the coup narrative, which is, according to Brutus One, demoralizing Brazilian institutions.

Nonsense. The paperboy senator was sent to tell the US State Department that everything is proceeding according to plan.

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In Washington, the paperboy senator mumbled, we will explain that Brazil is not a banana republic. Well, it was not, but now, thanks to the Hybrid War hyenas, it is.

When you have a man holding 11 illegal bank accounts in Switzerland, listed in the Panama Papers, and already under investigation by the Supreme Court controlling the political destiny of a whole nation, you have a banana republic.

When you have a self-righteous provincial judge threatening to imprison former President Lula for a modest apartment and a ranch that he does not own, but at the same time is incapable of laying a finger on Brutus Two, alongside largely pompous Supreme Court judges, you have a banana republic.

Now compare Washington's non-reaction with Moscow's. The Russian Foreign Ministry, via the irrepressible Maria Zakharova, stressed the crucial BRICS partnership as well as the common Brazil-Russia positions within the G20. And Moscow made it clear that Brazil's problems should be solved within the constitutional legal framework and without any external interference.

Everyone knows what external interference means.

Full Spectrum Dominance reloaded

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I have been following the Brazilian coup-in-progress with a special emphasis on the US-backed/driven Hybrid Warfare bent on destroying the neo-developmentalist project for Latin America -- uniting at least some of the local elites, invested in developing internal markets, in association with the working classes. The key Hybrid War objective in this case is to install a neoliberal restoration.

Obviously the key target had to be Brazil, a BRICS member and the 7th largest economy in the world.

Imperial hacks go straight to the point when listing the Hybrid War tools and aims of what the Pentagon defined as Full Spectrum Dominance way back in 2002. So, US power flows from our unmatched military might, yes. Anything that expands the reach of US markets -- such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in trade, for example -- adds to the arsenal of US power. But in a deeper way, it's a product of the dominance of the US economy.

Yet the US economy is far from dominant. What matters now is what drives business away from America, or allow other nations to build a rival financial architecture that's less encumbered by a smorgasbord of sanctions.

Rival financial architecture has BRICS written all over it. And a smorgasbord of sanctions was not enough to make Iran cry uncle; Tehran will continue to practice a resistance economy. Not by accident, two of the BRICS -- Russia and China -- as well as Iran, feature as the Pentagon's top five existential threats, alongside nuclear-armed North Korea and, as the last lowly priority, terrorism.

Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)